In Listening Below the Noise Anne LeClaire writes about finding her spiritual path through a practice of silence. In this meditative book, Anne practices silence for 24 hours every other week. Ebbs and flows mark her journey. She describes the difficulty her family and friends have with this notion and her resolve to continue with her practice manifests in a richer creative experience. Ultimately, after years of practice she confronts and accepts her spirituality.

Set on lower Cape Cod, Anne finds solace in nature to escape the din of civilization. She thoughtfully compares her journey with Mary Lennox’ journey in the Secret Garden. Each chapter opens with a simple yet profound photograph by her son, Christopher, from various Cape Cod locations offering a calm sense of place.

The book is a gentle invitation to try this technique to discover the benefits as well as a reminder to continue to seek solitude in nature. Perhaps my laptop’s recent demise is a gift of synchronicity for me to pay attention and listen below the noise.

So, True Confessions time:

I’ve been skiing once in my life. It was a lot of fun, and I discovered several important things.

1] A sweatshirt and blue jeans work perfectly well as ski attire, unless you have some weird insistence on staying dry.
2] If someone [say, your skiing partner], runs over your hand – with a ski – while trying to help you with your bindings, it hurts. A lot. And then it’s really hard to hold your ski poles.
3] You can actually make the chair lift shut down if you take a big enough gainer getting off.
4] Skiing: not so hard. Stopping: slightly more hard. But sitting down works.
5] If there’s a trivia contest at the place where you go afterwards to sit and drink and lie about how well you did, you can win a t-shirt. Which comes in handy if you’re soaking wet. See: 1].

All of which is to say that I’m probably not the target market for Double Black, Wendy Clinch’s terrifically entertaining new Ski Diva mystery. [Oh. Not a girl, too. Another good point.] But Black had me from the first sentence:
“When Stacey Curtis found the dead man on the bed, she knew it was time to get her own apartment.”
Stacey is a young [twenty-ish] ski bum who’s fled a bad relationship in Boston to ski, work, and live at Spruce Peak, a Vermont resort reminiscent of Killington. The body she finds is that of David Paxton, son of the resort’s owner. Before long, she’s met the local sheriff [from whom she ends up renting a room], much of the rest of Paxton’s family, and a young environmentalist/ski bum named Chip.

Complications, conversations, and winter chases ensue. While Stacie does very little actual detecting in the book [the resolving clues are very much in the "Hey, look what I found" style], the writing and characters are so good they carry the plot through. There are descriptions of various townspeople, local watering holes, and back roads that are clear, precise, and completely engaging, as is Stacey herself. There are descriptions of night skiing – not surprising since Clinch, a Vermonter, is founder of TheSkiDiva.com – that are so lovely they make me want to try it – you know, just as soon as my hand heals up.

Clinch is a wonderful writer [reminiscent of Julia Spencer- Fleming to my ear] and Double Black is completely enjoyable. Take it with you on your next trip up the hill; you never know when the chair lift will stop unexpectedly.

Northlanders strives on that change of pace from the norm. It manages to break away from what so many other series are doing right now, break expectation, without breaking convention or making itself inaccessible.

Brian Wood (DMZ, Demo) has made a name for himself with his attention to cultural history and detail, particularly seen in his depiction of New York City. The same is true in this book, where he captures the social and political environments of not only viking culture, but the cultures it was interacting with at the time.

Despite this attention to detail, Wood doesn’t seem tied down to complete realism, as evidenced by the dialogue, which is closer to something you would encounter in The Sopranos, than The Mighty Thor. While this might sound out of place, it actually adds a more personable quality to Wood’s characters and serves him well in conveying the emotions at play in this tale.

Wood has made yet another unconventional move in making each volume in the Northlanders series a stand alone story. Unlike so many other comic series, one volume of Northlanders tells a whole story, taking part in a particular setting of viking culture. This allows readers the freedom to hop in and out of the series where and whenever they wish, and it allows Wood to explore the many facets and time-periods of viking culture.

Sven the Returned takes place in 980 A.D., following the titular Sven from Constantinople back to his home in the Orkney islands, to claim his inheritance after the death of his father, the chief. Sven’s homecoming isn’t exactly welcome and leads into a complicated and bloody feud between him and his uncle, who has named himself chief in Sven’s absence. The story that incorporates some really compelling dialogues on religion vs. practicality and the importance of honoring one’s cultural background.

The artist, Davide Gianfelice succeeds in bringing a vibrant and colorful style to the pages of Northlanders. The action and layout are reminiscent of Frank Miller, with a focus on dramatic shading and clear breakdowns of complex action sequences. Yet another example of Northlanders’ refreshing, yet familiar, style.

With Northlanders, Brian Wood has secured himself as my most anticipated author in comics. Between this and DMZ, I find myself impatiently waiting a new release of his every three months. Check it out, whether you’re into Norse history and legend, good art,or just sick of zombies, Northlanders has something to satisfy you.

There is plenty of edge in this story but it is balanced with such tenderness and humanity that you find yourself drawn to even the most distasteful characters. The title of the book comes from a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins and it, too, plays a role in this book. I found myself remembering lines from the poem and revisiting the characters from this story long after I had finished the book.

It has become a sad, self-perpetuating cycle. Every couple of months I pick up my copy of Moby Dick, read the first chapter, then put it down on the floor next to my bed. The next night the latest issue of The New Yorker is lying on top of it, followed shortly by older ones I haven’t completely read (which is pretty much all of them), and a small tower of magazines begins to rise. Two months later I either decide to do a little cleaning or accidentally knock over the ‘zine tower, and I am again confronted by the fat old paperback at the bottom. By this time, though, I’ve forgotten everything that happened in that first chapter, so I have to read it all over again. I should now be a renowned scholar on the first 12 pages of Melville’s alleged masterpiece. But all I would be able to say, if someone asked me what happened in that first chapter, would be: “I don’t know, not much.”

I’m not sure why I feel I have to read Moby Dick. I know English professors who have never cracked the spine on it or “Ulysses,” and they don’t seem any worse off for it. I guess when it comes right down to it, it has less to do with reading for enjoyment or becoming well-read than it does with finishing what I started. That, and I hate the way the book seems to sneer at me every time I find it at the bottom of that pile of magazines. What right does it have to mock me like that? I own it. And yet I am bothered by this. It’s almost like…an obsession.

It is time to break the cycle. Today I commit. One chapter down, 134 to go. Although now that I think of it, I should probably reread Chapter 1 just one more time.

Here’s why bookstores are wonderful and dangerous places: You can get an email about a book Tuesday afternoon, order the book Tuesday night, and pick it up Thursday morning while you’re at work. You can if you work at Bear Pond, anyway, and, even better, if the book’s so entirely enthralling you can’t stop looking at it ["Hey! Customer!" "What? Oh. Hi. Sorry."] you can try to pass it off as………research? Yeah, research. That’s it. Thank you, Jon Lovitz.  Really, though, if you’re a mystery fan at all and the book in question is Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, what else can you do?

Notebooks is the result of years of research by John Curran, a Christie scholar and – especially – fan. The introductory essays themselves are worth the price of admission: Curran became friends with Christie’s grandson when they met at a play in Toronto. Years later, he found Christie’s notebooks in a storage room of her daughter’s estate. He then, enraptured, sorted the notebook entries – there were 73 notebooks and Agatha apparently didn’t assign one to each novel, she just grabbed whatever was handy – and, even more impressive, translated her handwriting. [Notebooks also contains reproductions of actual notebook pages. They're indecipherable.]  You want to know how she worked out the concept for The ABC Murders? It’s here. Where she may have gotten the idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? Notebooks has a letter from an Illustrious Personage suggesting just such a thing. Feel like reading a couple of previously unpublished Poirot short stories? Notebooks has ‘em. This book is a treasure trove; it’s a literary land mine of the very best sort; it’s an authorial pool of knowledge into which you may happily dive and never return. Just go read it already.

A Yes or No Answer won the Poet’s Prize in 2010, which is awarded annually to the best book of verse published by an American during the preceding year.  It is a valued prize particularly since it is awarded by other poets.

Jane  lives with her husband, author Howard Norman, in Washington, DC and E. Calais, Vermont.  They have one daughter, Emma.  Jane and Howard are great supporters of Bear Pond Books and have each done events here.  We watched their daughter Emma grow up as she, too, was a frequent visitor to the store.